Pages

Thursday, December 31, 2015

The New York Times reports that with inequality at its
highest levels in nearly a century the very richest Americans have financed a
sophisticated and effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes, consisting
of expensive lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax activists who
exploit and defend an array of tax-avoidance maneuvers, virtually none of them
available to taxpayers of more modest means. The ultra-wealthy “literally pay
millions of dollars for these services,” said Jeffrey A. Winters, a political
scientist at Northwestern University who studies economic elites, “and save in
the tens or hundreds of millions in taxes.” Whatever tax rates Congress sets,
the actual rates paid by the ultra-wealthy tend to fall over time as they exploit
their numerous advantages. The major industry group representing private equity
funds spends hundreds of thousands of dollars each year lobbying on such issues
as “carried interest,” the granddaddy of Wall Street tax loopholes, which makes
it possible for fund managers to pay the capital gains rate rather than the
higher standard tax rate on a substantial share of their income for running the
fund.

Operating largely out of public view — in tax court, through
arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal
Revenue Service — the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle
away at the government’s ability to tax them. The effect has been to create a
kind of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans.

“There’s this notion
that the wealthy use their money to buy politicians; more accurately, it’s that
they can buy policy, and specifically, tax policy,” said Jared Bernstein, a
senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who
served as chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “That’s
why these egregious loopholes exist, and why it’s so hard to close them.”

“We do have two different tax systems, one for normal
wage-earners and another for those who can afford sophisticated tax advice,”
said Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of San Diego who
studies the intersection of tax policy and inequality. “At the very top of the
income distribution, the effective rate of tax goes down, contrary to the
principles of a progressive income tax system.”

Two decades ago, when Bill Clinton was elected president,
the 400 highest-earning taxpayers in America paid nearly 27 percent of their
income in federal taxes, according to I.R.S. data. By 2012, when President
Obama was re-elected, that figure had fallen to less than 17 percent, which is
just slightly more than the typical family making $100,000 annually, when
payroll taxes are included for both groups. From Obama’s inauguration through
the end of 2012, federal income tax rates on individuals did not change
(excluding payroll taxes). But the highest-earning one-thousandth of Americans
went from paying an average of 20.9 percent to 17.6 percent. By contrast, the
top 1 percent, excluding the very wealthy, went from paying just under 24
percent on average to just over that level.

Each of the top 400 earners took home, on average, about
$336 million in 2012, the latest year for which data is available. If the bulk
of that money had been paid out as salary or wages, as it is for the typical
American, the tax obligations of those wealthy taxpayers could have more than
doubled. Instead, much of their income came from convoluted partnerships and
high-end investment funds. Other earnings accrued in opaque family trusts and
foreign shell corporations, beyond the reach of the tax authorities. The
well-paid technicians who devise these arrangements toil away at white-shoe law
firms and elite investment banks, as well as a variety of obscure boutiques.
But at the fulcrum of the strategizing over how to minimize taxes are so-called
family offices, the customized wealth management departments of Americans with
hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in assets. Family offices have
existed since the late 19th century, when the Rockefellers pioneered the
institution, and gained popularity in the 1980s. But they have proliferated
rapidly over the last decade, as the ranks of the super-rich, and the size of
their fortunes, swelled to record proportions. Family offices, many of which
are dedicated to managing and protecting the wealth of a single family, oversee
everything from investment strategy to philanthropy. But tax planning is a core
function. While the specific techniques these advisers employ to minimize taxes
can be mind-numbingly complex, they generally follow a few simple principles,
like converting one type of income into another type that’s taxed at a lower
rate.

Organizing one’s business as a partnership can be lucrative
in its own right. Some of the partnerships from which the wealthy derive their
income are allowed to sell shares to the public, making it easy to cash out a
chunk of the business while retaining control. But unlike publicly traded
corporations, they pay no corporate income tax; the partners pay taxes as
individuals. And the income taxes are often reduced by large deductions, such
as for depreciation. The IRS is not allowed to collect underpaid taxes directly
from these partnerships, even those with several hundred partners. Instead, it
must collect from each individual partner, requiring the agency to commit
significant time and manpower. The budget deal that Congress approved in
October allows the I.R.S. to collect underpaid taxes from large partnerships at
the firm level for the first time — which is far easier for the agency — thanks
to a provision that lawmakers slipped into the deal at the last minute, before
many lobbyists could mobilize. But the new rules are relatively weak — firms
can still choose to have partners pay the taxes — and don’t take effect until
2018, giving the wealthy plenty of time to weaken them further.

The wealthy can also avail themselves of a range of customized
tax deductions that go far beyond writing off a home office or dinner with a
client. One strategy is to place income in a type of charitable trust,
generating a deduction that offsets the income tax. The trust then purchases
what’s known as a private placement life insurance policy, which invests the
money on a tax-free basis, frequently in a number of hedge funds. The person’s
heirs can inherit, also tax-free, whatever money is left after the trust pays
out a percentage each year to charity, often a considerable sum.

The inheritance tax has been a primary target. In the early
1990s, a California family office executive named Patricia Soldano began
lobbying on behalf of wealthy families to repeal the tax, which would not only
save them money, but also make it easier to preserve their business empires
from one generation to the next. The idea struck many hardened operatives as
unrealistic at the time, given that the tax affected only the wealthiest
Americans. But Ms. Soldano’s efforts — funded in part by the Mars and Koch
families — laid the groundwork for a one-year elimination in 2010. The tax has
been restored, but currently applies only to couples leaving roughly $11
million or more to their heirs, up from those leaving more than $1.2 million
when Ms. Soldano started her campaign. It affected fewer than 5,200 families
last year.

For the ultra-wealthy, “our tax code is like a leaky
barrel,” said J. Todd Metcalf, the Democrats’ chief tax counsel on the Senate
Finance Committee.

Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, has urgedworkers to confront low wage growth and zero-hours contracts by joining a trade
union.

Unions have struggled to extend their reach to the kinds of workplace where the use of temporary or casual staff is widespread.

“To every worker – freelance, contract, temporary or
permanent – I say: get a group of your colleagues together and join a union.
Feel that support, that confidence and that pride that only comes when you
stand with your workmates and use your collective sway to make working life
better,” O’Grady said in a New Year message. “According to the government,
we’re out of the doldrums and getting back to economic health. But not everyone
is feeling it. It will take until 2018 for average earnings just to get back to
the real value they held in 2008. Ten years of pay going backwards while
everything else – transport, housing, bills – gets ever more expensive and debt
piles up. A lost decade.”

She expressed concern
about the growing evidence of a two-speed recovery, with consumer spending and
house prices expanding strongly, while manufacturing and exports have remained
weak. Britain is at risk of turning into a ‘below stairs’ labour market –
college leavers are eight times more likely to find work in the service sector
than in manufacturing. And when they do find work, it’s too often dead end, with
little chance to progress O’Grady said.

Trade unions have come under attack from the government,
which has introduced legislation to curtail industrial action. But with average
wages growing at just 2% a year, and zero-hours contracts becoming increasingly
prevalent. The TUC calculates the average worker is still £40 a week worse off
in real terms than before the financial crisis – the equivalent of over £2,000
a year. The Institute of Directors (IoD) ,which speaks for business pointed out
“The last few years have been a good period for larger business, as they have
been able to borrow cheaply, and wage growth has been slow.”

The nine housebuilders hold 615,152 housing plots in their
landbank, according to financial disclosures. This is four times the total
number of homes built in Britain in the past year. Berkeley, Barratt, Persimmon
and Taylor Wimpey – the four biggest companies in the industry – account for
more than 450,000 of the plots. They are also sitting on £947 million of cash and
declared or issued more than £1.5 billion in payouts to shareholders in 2015. Ttheir
profits and share prices are booming as they enjoy the benefits of snapping up
land cheaply and as the average selling price of their property rises. The
housebuilders also include Bellway, Bovis, Crest Nicholson, Galliford Try and
Redrow.

The land held by housebuilders includes sites they own and
sites that they have an contractual option to build on. Some housebuilders do
not publicly disclose all the land they control, meaning their total landbank
could be even bigger. For example, Bellway does not report land that has not
got planning permission for house construction, while Persimmon says it
controls 18,000 acres of “strategic land” on top of more than 90,000 plots that
already have planning permission.

Shelter’s Toby Lloyd, head of policy for the housing
charity, said: “Developers do need a pipeline of future sites – but when
housebuilding is still stubbornly low and landbanks are this large it is a
signal of how dysfunctional our housebuilding system is. These are private
companies so it’s reasonable for them to seek profits. But when their profits
are so high we should be questioning why the government is directing subsidies
towards developers to build barely affordable starter homes and away from providing
the genuinely affordable housing we so desperately need."

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Decades of over-fishing, industrial pollution, plastic waste
and threats to basic ecological stability posed by climate change all
demonstrate how "humanity is collectively mismanaging the ocean to the
brink of collapse," according to the World Wildlife Fund's Living Blue
Planet Report. Now another threat is emerging: deep sea mining. New technology
has made the exaction of copper, zinc, manganese, nickel, cobalt and gold from
under the sea possible.

The world's first-ever commercial deep sea mining (DSM)
project is due to start in under two years time - and environmentalists and
scientists are worried.

"We currently have very poor understanding of deep sea
ecosystems, few protected areas, and management regimes that are rudimentary at
best," said marine conservation biologist Rick Steiner. "Thus, the
potential for irreversible ecological damage due to DSM is high. We need a
ten-year continuous time series of research before we will have even a vague
understanding of the environmental impact."

The Solwara 1 deep sea mine, the joint venture between
Canadian mining company Nautilus Minerals and the Papua New Guina government, located
19 miles off Papua New Guinea in the Pacific Ocean, is the first project in the
world to be granted a commercial DSM extraction license. Production is now
expected to start in early 2018, and the company plans to mine deposits of
copper, zinc and gold worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Nautilus Minerals claims mining the seabed will have less of
an impact than terrestrial mining due to the smaller scale of its operation -
with DSM, minerals are found in concentrated nodules associated with volcanic
activity - and the fact that no roads or infrastructure would be required to
gain access. However, independent science-based reports released in 2009, 2011
and 2012 detail deficiencies in the science and modelling used by Nautilus. The
reports claim that DSM could cause irreversible ecological damage to sites that
could contain hundreds of species previously unknown to science. It also says
the mining activity would introduce light and noise pollution in pristine
areas, and could produce sediment plumes introducing toxic metals into the food
chain - harming tuna, dolphins and potentially humans. Deep Sea Mining
Campaign, published a report in 2015 entitled Accountability Zero that was
endorsed by economists, scientists and NGOs including Greenpeace Australia and
Earthworks. The group analyzed the results of an environmental impact report
conducted by the American consultancy firm Earth Economics, and commissioned by
Nautilus, which compared the potential impacts of Solwara 1 to existing
land-based copper mining. Accountability Zero claims the report failed to
account for the unique social, cultural and economic values of oceans.

The number of companies seeking to mine in international
waters has tripled in the last four years, and the US, UK, Russia, China,
Japan, Brazil, Germany and South Korea all have exploration projects underway.
Most of these are in the Pacific, while others are in the Atlantic Ocean,
Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Separate projects have also been proposed in the
national waters of Fiji, the Cook Islands, Tonga and New Zealand. The process
regulating DSM is distinct. Permits to explore for minerals are issued by
governments within their territorial waters - 200 nautical miles from shore -
or by the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in international waters. Formed
in 1994, the ISA was established by the UN to regulate international waters,
described as "common heritage of mankind" and not subject to direct
claims by sovereign states. But a major criticism of the ISA has been the
issuance of exploration permits without having first approved environmental
standards. Despite issuing mining permits since its inception, it wasn't until
July 2015 that the ISA began drafting a framework on environmental standards
and regulations, which is still to be finalized. A policy paper published in
Science called for the ISA to cease issuing permits until environmental
controls are in place. Written by researchers from the Center for Ocean
Solutions and co-authors from leading global institutions, the report proposes
a strategy for balancing commercial extraction with protection for seabed
habitats. But despite the paper's warnings, the ISA went ahead and authorized
the latest Pacific exploration contract to China Minmetals. Altogether, the ISA
has issued 27 permits for mineral exploration covering around 1.2 million
square miles of seabed. All but eight have been issued within the last four
years.

In the US, the Center for Biological Diversity launched a
lawsuit against the government over its approval of the first-ever large-scale
DSM exploration project between Hawaii and Mexico, claiming it lacked the
required environmental assessment.

New Zealand is another country where anti-DSM campaigning
has been strong due to the government's 2004 Foreshore and Seabed legislation,
which created a series of prospecting permits for companies seeking to exploit
the iron sand reserves in the west coast seabed. Kiwis Against Seabed Mining
(KASM) was established in 2005 to protest DSM, and its biggest victory to date
came against Trans Tasman Resources in December of last year. TTR wanted to
mine 50 million tons of iron sand from the seabed, but was rejected by the
country's Environment Protection Authority.

"To date seabed mining has been very much under the
radar but it absolutely warrants a lot more attention," said Phil McCabe,
chairman of KASM. "Greenpeace has stated that seabed mining has the
potential to have the largest areal impact on the planet of any human activity
- it's akin to deforestation on a massive scale, and we need to turn people on
to what it is."

Yet again, capitalism is willing to sacrifice unique
life-sustaining ecosystems for the short-term profit of some big corporation with
very little thought given to the long-term environmental costs of such brazen
exploitation of resources.

It is illegal in the United States for an internet
service provider to discriminate between different types of data. America’s
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-2 to classify broadband
internet as a public utility, ensuring that all data is treated equally. Large
internet companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter (as well as
non-profits such as Wikipedia) have convinced mobile operators to offer their
services at no cost—so-called “zero-rating.” Net neutrality means that the
Internet works the same for different users of the net, regardless of who you
are.

All Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to do is make the
world a better place for his new daughter, or so he would like us all to believe. Facebook is to provide a free but
limited internet to the developing world. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of
India, however, has asked Reliance Communications, Facebook’s sole operator
partner in India, to halt the Internet.org project. So-called “zero-rating”
services have been criticized for violating net neutrality—principles that
prohibit internet service providers from favoring, slowing, or restricting
access to particular sites—and for threatening free speech and innovation. Net
neutrality activists have long argued that Internet.org provides a “walled
garden” experience because the sites that users can access for free are
determined by Facebook and its telecom partners, essentially making them
gatekeepers to the internet for poor people. Millions of people already have a
skewed perception of the web, believing Facebook to be the internet.

Facebook now boasts 1 billion people who visit the social
network everyday and 1.5 billion who do so every month. Facebook see
India as a huge untapped market and are aggressively going after new users
there, even if it means having to provide them free access. It’s estimated that
about 1 billion people in the country lack internet access, and most of them
are expected to come online for the first time via cheap mobile phones. In a
November call with investors, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg singled out India as
the country “that benefits the most from connectivity.” As of last month,
Internet.org has connected more than 1 million people in India. Net neutrality
activists take issue with this fact, arguing that Facebook and its partners are
essentially acting as gatekeepers to the internet for poor people. The service
in India is also known to be slow, spotty, and unreliable. Zuckerberg’s project
to confuse hundreds of millions of emerging market users into thinking that
Facebook and the Internet are one and the same.

When the poor, who can’t afford a net connection
come to the Facebook Zero service confusingly called Internet.org, they’re made
to believe they’re on the internet while in reality they’re only on Facebook
and a few hand-picked sites. And the sites too are picked in secret under some
unknown process. For instance, Facebook chose to offer the distant-second
search engine Bing instead of industry-leading Google. Why? Is it rivalry with
Google? Or because of Microsoft’s stake in Facebook? And then Facebook’s Zero
product features a tiny job site like Babajob instead of the industry-leading
Naukri. Why? No one knows.

Indian journalist Nikhil Pahwa pointed out research after
research that shows zero services around the world universally tend to do badly
for the people who use them. It all seems to amount to economic
racism—exploiting the poor in under-developed parts of the world to become your
customers under the guise of some apparent charitable purpose. While offering
them a shoddy, stunted version of the real thing. As Vijay Shekhar Sharma,
founder of payments app PayTM, puts it: “It’s poor internet for poor people”. Internet.org
is a proprietary and secret Facebook initiative to ensure its competitors, and
those of its “partners”, will face obstacles in reaching hundreds of millions
of poorer users bought using the lure of “free”. Zuckerberg wants, is to take
away from telecom operators the power to discriminate against websites, only so
that Facebook can wield that power instead. The Internet should be neutral, he
insists, so long as Facebook is allowed to play kingmaker in between. Zuckerberg’s
ambitions become clear when, in his article, he says Internet.org is open to
“all mobile operators” and “as many internet providers” as possible. Who does
he not mention? Internet sites and mobile apps. Because the power to decide
which of them get on Internet.org will rest with Facebook. Internet.org is not
open, and despite its name, is not the Internet.

You know who doesn’t have a say in Facebook’s
Internet.org? You. Neither Internet.org, Airtel Zero nor any other major zero
rating platform gives the choice to the consumer. Instead, the decisions are
made by big telcos working in partnership with large Internet companies.
Smaller firms are forced to commercially lobby and sign up in order to prevent
their competitors from being able to deal in and crush them.

The Odisha Chief Minister says that “While the
underprivileged deserve much more than what is available, nobody should decide
what exactly are their requirements. If you dictate what the poor should get, you
take away their rights to choose what they think is best for them.”

We may find it advantageous that we do not have to pay
(extra) for a particular type of traffic. Nevertheless, zero-rating lead to
selected traffic from the Internet service provider itself or affiliated
providers being favoured above other traffic. And this is exactly the kind of
situation net neutrality aims to avoid – allowing the Internet service provider
to decide how we use the Internet. Instead, the Internet should remain an open,
neutral platform for all types of communication. Facebook is no doubt hoping
that India’s and other countries interpretation of net neutrality doesn’t catch
on, because zero-rated content is crucial to the social network’s growth strategy.
Facebook want to be the ultimate portal to the internet – the average person’s
starting point – and their best chance of playing this role for new customers
is in emerging markets, where most people’s first internet experience is through
the handset. Through deals with carriers in such markets, Facebook can to all
intents and purposes be the internet, or at least the service new users most
associate with being online. This was a major reason for Facebook’s $19 billion
WhatsApp takeover – WhatsApp plays a similar role for many new internet users,
and Facebook needed to both neutralize the threat and ride on WhatsApp’s own
growing popularity.

The World Bank says that “malnutrition contributes to
infant, child and maternal illness, decreased learning capacity, lower
productivity and higher mortality.” How many people does this affect? Almost
800 million people. Globally, at least one-third of all food produced for human
consumption is wasted. That’s more than a billion tonnes of food a year.

Monsanto’s activity around the world is causing acute harm
to our planet’s health. Food and Water
Watch has reported that the now widespread use of pesticides, herbicides, and
genetically engineered seeds—many of them created by Monsanto—has resulted in
herbicide-resistant “super-weeds” and the application of more and more
chemicals to fight them. Earlier this year, the World Health Organization
declared that glyphosate—the main ingredient of Monsanto’s Roundup
herbicide—was “probably carcinogenic,” or cancer-causing

Nevertheless, Monsanto president and chief operating officer Brett
Begemann called organic agriculture “low-productivity” and “not the most
sustainable solution” and argued that “High-productivity agriculture is
actually the best that we can do for the environment and for sustainability.”

Begemann couldn’t be more wrong. The truth is this: The
massive industrial agriculture system Monsanto and other agribusinesses have
built over the last century is doing more harm than good. Organic agriculture
is but one piece of the puzzle because for sure this is not n all black and
white situation, there are grey areas. One of the most persistent arguments for
modern, mechanized agriculture is that it produces a lot of food per acre,
leaving more land for other purposes. However, in many poor countries, the
smaller the farm, the greater its yields because when people only have a small
amount of land to support them, they pour all their efforts into that land and
eke more food per square foot than their neighbors with more land. The
eco-modernists of the Breakthrough Institute countered that “the smallest
African farms produced about 25 percent more yield per hectare than the largest
African farms. But the average American farm produced about 10 times more yield
per hectare than either. Yield gaps between farmers in rich nations and those
in poor countries are profound.” They conclude we could grow more food on less
land if every farm were as big and efficient as those in the U.S but the path
to higher yields starts with farms getting smaller, rather than larger. That’s
what’s happened in Asia — farms are getting smaller, using Green Revolution
pesticides and fertilizers, and getting bigger yields. Creating big industrial
farms in Africa or Asia would probably be a disaster. Linus Blomqvist, one of
the authors of Nature Unbound, explained it would be a terrible idea, because
it would mean that all those small subsistence farmers would have no way of
supporting themselves.

Size just doesn’t matter (when we are talking about farm
yields). You can have small farms with high yields, or big farms with low
yields, and vice versa. Also, if we are chiefly concerned about environmental
impact, farm size matters a lot less than the techniques and technologies those
farms use.

In 2007, a group of researchers led by Catherine Badgley
made a big-picture estimate of how many additional acres we would need to
switch over to 100 percent organic. The number they arrived at was startlingly
low: Zero acres. That is, they projected that we could go all-organic without
increasing the amount of land used for agriculture one bit. But lots of other
researchers disputed and protested, asking Are you really looking carefully at
where you are getting your nitrogen?

Creating nitrogen fertilizer organically takes space. That’s
because there are just two ways to get the nitrogen in our atmosphere into a
form that plants can use: Bacteria can do it, or humans can do it by burning
decomposed dinosaur goo (i.e. fossil fuel, mostly natural gas), through the
industrial Haber-Bosch process. (There’s also some nitrogen fixed by lightning
and internal combustion engines, but that’s hard to catch.) Both bacteria and
humans start with nitrogen in the air and bind it to hydrogen, creating a form
of nitrogen plants and use: ammonia, urea, ammonium, or nitrites.

The way you create fertilizer organically is to fill a field
with legumes: plants that harbor nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Once they’ve grown,
you plow those nitrogen-packed plants into the ground. That takes up time and
land that’s not growing food. Of course, you can also feed these plants to
cattle, but you lose a lot of the nitrogen in the process, even if you put all
the manure back on the field. When you are simply pouring synthetic nitrogen
out of a bag, you don’t need this fallow period. So instead of looking at how much
food an acre of land can produce for just one crop, we need to look at how much
food an acre of land can produce over multiple years — and account for those
fallow years, when nitrogen-fixing crops like legumes are planted. Following
the 2007 Badgley study, other researchers looked at this issue — but largely
sidestepped the question, arguing that yields didn’t depend on farmers devoting
their fields to nitrogen production for a long time. Even so, the new studies
found that organic yields were lower than conventional; the best
apples-to-apples comparisons had organic producing somewhere around 30 to 20
percent less.

But then other researchers protested again: What about
manure?

It’s true that organic farm yields don’t depend on farmers
dedicating growing seasons to nitrogen production, but that’s probably because
the farmers that spend less time producing nitrogen with legumes apply more
manure to their fields. Manure is a big source of nitrogen fertilizer for
organic farmers, especially in richer countries. When farmers use manure to
fertilize their fields, they are using nitrogen that has traveled through
several steps: First it’s crafted by bacteria or people, then it’s absorbed by
plants and turned into new growth, then it’s eaten by an animal and pooped out.
In the U.S., a lot of the nitrogen that organic farmers get is really synthetic
ammonia that has passed through livestock before reaching them in the form of
manure. If we did away with this transfer, and instead set aside more land for
generating this manure, how many additional acres would we have to clear? No
one has done that calculation — it was just too thorny a problem for the
researchers to solve.

According to available evidence it does look like we’d have
to significantly expand our farmland if we switched all agriculture over to
organic. Now, in theory, the amount of extra land you’d need to go organic
could be much smaller if all the small farms in Africa performed as well as the
Rodale Institute experimental farm in Pennsylvania. Pour research money into
finding improvements, and we might be able to get the yield gap between
conventional and organic to disappear entirely. But you could make the same
argument on the other side of the ledger: If you were able to get more
conventional farmers to use best practices, we’d also see even more food
production from even less land area. This doesn’t mean we seek high yields at
any cost. Organic agriculture requires more land upstream of production,
because you have to grow nitrogen fertilizer before you can grow food. But
conventional agriculture takes up more space downstream from production:
Fertilizers wash into waterways creating dead zones; soil washes away, too, and
that eventually creates the need for more farmland; the manure lagoons required
for confined animal feeding operations dominate space, especially when they
leak. The great strength of organic agriculture is in building up and restoring
soil. Better soil structure, in turn, means less erosion and pollution. Perhaps
we could do that good soil building, and use some synthetic nitrogen to keep
our agricultural footprint from expanding. Rather than forcing a choice between
organic and industrial, we should create hybrids out of whatever techniques
work best.

We should also ask: Is it really so bad if we can’t produce
the same amount of food on the same amount of land? If we wasted less food, and
distributed it more equitably, and ate less meat, we could all feed ourselves
well, even with significantly lower farm yields. As population grows over the
next 35 years, however, we’re going to have to do it all: reduce waste, farm
more efficiently, share more equitably, eat less meat, and increase yields. Jonathan
Foley, calculated that, if we do all of those things, we might just be able to
freeze agricultural expansion, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and feed all
the people who are going to be with us by 2050. It’s easy enough to note that
we waste a ridiculous amount of food, and that many of us are getting fat and
could use a reduction in calories, but it’s much harder to turn these trends
around. To make matters worse, climate change is driving farm yields down as we
struggle. Feeding ourselves is not going to be easy: If we simply dismiss the
option of increasing production and try to make up for it in other ways, we
will fall short. Falling short would mean converting more land to agriculture —
more forests felled, more prairies plowed — which means more greenhouse gas
emissions. It’s clear that cutting down forests for farmland is terrible from a
greenhouse gas perspective. The total amount of land clearance for agriculture
has leveled out for now; the forests burning in South-East Asia are balanced
out by the forests that have returned to New England and Europe.

It’s important to be efficient in our land use with farming.
But that doesn’t mean that we all need to stop worrying and love industrial
farming. Organic production has a lot to contribute and industrial farming has
a lot of room for improvement. As we strive toward sustainability, context
always matters. In many places it will make sense to maximize production, so as
to spare forests elsewhere. In some places, organic makes more sense — where
there’s an abundance of manure, or no synthetic fertilizers available, or where
there’s plenty of land best used for farms. Sometimes it feels as if the divide
between organic and industrial farming is too wide to bridge — but we’re almost
certainly going to need the best of both for a future that makes sense. There
are zero barriers to adoption of successful organic techniques by conventional
farmers. And where there are negative externalities like water pollution, they
should be dealt with, e.g., by regulation or tax, for both organic and
conventional agriculture. But throwing out all of the tools of BigAg, like
being able to fix nitrogen or use biotech to create pest-resistant plants, as
the organic believers do, is completely senseless and smacks of religious
dogma. We should not forget that the great Dust-Bowl of the American mid-west
was before the extensive usage of pesticides and was because of mono-cropping
organic agricultural methods.

Philanthropists are often lauded for helping to even the
playing field for those less fortunate. Every week, millionaires flock from TED
conferences to "idea festivals" sharing viral new presentations on
how to solve the world's biggest problems. This acceptance of the philanthropic
order was not always the case. In the era of Carnegie and Rockefeller, for
instance, many distrusted these philanthropic barons, arguing they had no right
to horde would-be tax dollars for their own pet causes, especially since these
"donations" came from the toil of the workers beneath them. The term
philanthrocapitalism was coined by Matthew Bishop, an editor at the Economist
and expanded in a 2008 book co-written with Michael Green. They define the term
in two key ways: First, they argue that philanthropy is becoming more
business-like and results-oriented, with donors increasingly applying the profit
motive to giving practices. Secondly, they suggest that capitalism is a
"naturally" philanthropic practice, and therefore grants should be
aimed at helping the private sector to solve social problems. What's not new
about the "new" philanthropy is the emphasis on cost-effectiveness
and strategic giving. Champions of philanthrocapitalism exhibit quite
astounding historical amnesia when it comes to the history of large foundations
such as Carnegie and Rockefeller, which were modelled on the corporate
structures of their founders' businesses. Results-oriented, strategic
philanthropy is a modern phenomenon, but it can be dated to the turn of the
20th-century and the late Gilded Age, not to the start of the 21st century.

In her new book ‘NoSuch Thing As A Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy’,
Linsey McGoey challenges the legitimacy of philanthropy. McGoey investigates
the Gates Foundation's interventions in US K-12 education and global health,
raising serious concerns about the extent to which the massive philanthropic
sector depletes funding for traditional social services and prioritizes the
agendas of unelected foundation leaders. Institutions like the Gates Foundation
take increasingly leading roles in policymaking and governance, McGoey argues,
the line between traditional notions of charity and top-down consolidation of
power becomes unclear; and with this largely unchecked influence,
philanthro-capitalists, like Bill Gates, have pushed countries across the world
to accept market based solutions for crises like education inequity and disease
proliferation - despite evidence that these problems are often rooted in
actions taken by those philanthro-capitalists themselves. McGoey asks, what is
the place of such philanthropy in a democratic society? The answer seems to be
"none at all."

There was a recent hullabaloo about Mark Zuckerberg's public
announcement that he was going to "give away" 99% of his Facebook
shares to charity - which turned out to actually mean a LLC under his control
and exempt from non-profit rules against political expenditures and
profit-making. Through setting up an LLC, Zuckerberg has skirted any
requirements to publicly list any grants made to either for-profits or
non-profits. His giving can take place in total secrecy: we'll know only about
the grants that he wishes to disclose. When an entity such as the Gates
Foundation offers grants to for-profit corporations, it needs to legally
exercise "expenditure responsibility," which means that it needs to
take measures to ensure that the grant is used for charitable ends, rather than
private profiteering. There are no such restrictions on Zuckerberg's LLC. Zuckerberg
can legally offer the bulk of his "philanthropy" to any for-profit
recipients he wants and still receive public acclaim for "gifting"
his fortune. We're seeing the rise of a new, horizontal philanthropy - the rich
giving directly to the rich - at a level that's completely unprecedented.

Something that separates today's donors from famous
benefactors of the past is that the bloodiest, most fatal effects of wealth
extraction have been largely outsourced to developing regions, where brutal
labor battles occur regularly but are less visible and therefore less salient
for consumers in the west. When Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, first called
for the wealthy to spend their fortunes on the poor, his workers were engaged
in very visible struggles over harsh working conditions at Carnegie's steel
plants. These workers had a high degree of public support. Thus, while his philanthropic
benefactors did curry some public favor, there was widespread skepticism over
the motivations of his charitable giving. Also, high-profile, 19th-century
authors such as Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens often wrote essays and fiction
that satirized and denounced the way that philanthropy seemed to entrench
inequalities rather than dissipate them. That literary thread seems almost
absent today.

Philanthrocapitalism is seeking to make both charities and
public sector institutions run more like corporations, both in structure (with
the seeding of for-profit "social enterprises") and operation (as in
the case of teacher evaluation reform). Garry Jenkins, a law professor at Ohio
State, has done important work here, showing how large foundations such as the
Gates Foundation increasingly refuse to accept "open-door" proposals
from smaller non-profits: returning again and again to proven recipients. This
tendency is undermining genuine competition. Grantees feel increasingly
burdened by unreasonable expectations and short turnarounds for demonstrating a
gift's impact. The education sector in the United States has gone through
upheaval after upheaval as schools and school districts try and meet the
mercurial demands of donors who are themselves accountable to no one other than
a foundation's trustees or board of directors.

Philanthrocapitalists seek to solve problems of social
inequality through market expansion - not because of their own "lust for
profit" but because of a sincere faith in unbridled capitalism. Gates is not
trying to position himself to profit personally. His foundation has offered
tens of millions in non-repayable grants to some of the world's largest
corporations, including Mastercard. IRS regulations stipulate that grants must
be used solely for charitable gain. But clearly the foundation's giving is used
in a highly commercial manner by recipients such as Mastercard. US taxpayers
subsidize philanthropic foundations such as the Gates Foundation through
displaced tax revenue. Where is the media and congressional scrutiny over
whether the Gates Foundation's charity towards Mastercard is really a fair use
of taxpayer money. If the Gates Foundation can offer a gift to Mastercard,
there's nothing stopping the Koch brothers from directly subsidizing any
corporation they want - as long as they can argue that the gift was in line
with their own charitable mandate.

One tenet of this faith in the charity business: the idea
that the "data-driven" and "market-based" philanthropic
efforts of today are far more efficient and productive than social services
provided by the government. Robert B. Reich place the yearly cost to the US
treasury from philanthropic tax exemptions at $40 billion. In the United
States, study after study has shown that less than a third of all charitable
giving from foundations and individuals is geared towards people who are living
in situations of extreme economic need. Poverty is rising in the United States;
it's clear that this purportedly golden age of giving is not making a dent in
reducing growing inequality. At the global level, there's evidence that a
growing reliance on enrolling the private sector in service delivery can be
extremely expensive for state actors. An organization called Eurodad, the
European Network on Debt and Development, has studied the rise of
public-private partnerships in global development and concluded that partnerships
with the private sector can often double the costs expended by governments. We
see this in the United States with for-profit prison services, something that
even the Economist pointed out was often more costly for tax-payers than
non-profit correctional facilities.

In the realm of American education and global health policy,
much of the Gates Foundation's focuses seem based on personal whim rather than
a "save the most lives" philosophy. Researchers argue that Gates'
fight to eradicate polio, which has mostly been defeated in the developing
world, siphons off both funding and crucial local state services away from TB
and Malaria containment efforts. Nonetheless, the Gates Foundation is widely
recognized for a utilitarian, data-driven attitude. People in the global health
community are divided over whether polio efforts are worth their immense cost,
given the fact that new cases are rare. Far, far more children die of, say,
road accidents in the developing world than they die of polio. For years,
global health scholars have pointed out that bequests from donors such as the
Gates Foundation do not correspond well with the global burden of disease. A
negligible amount of Gates Foundation money is put towards chronic diseases
like cancer, heart disease and obesity, which are biggest cause of premature
death in both the developed and the developing world, outpacing deaths from
infectious diseases. You don't see this reality reflected in the Gates
Foundation's global health disbursements.

The philanthropy of Carnegie's day was, in part, a response
to fears of militant labor uprisings. But "what's absent in the peppy
optimism of today's TED Heads is recognition of the historical struggles over
private profits and public gain that have shaped labor relations" since
the Gilded era. The philanthropic impulse comes from growing recognition that
wealth inequality inside wealthy nations and between nations is unsustainable
and certain to foster ongoing civil strife. Inequality is fuelling the current
philanthropic surge, but far too few people are examining whether this
"solution" is actually making a difference to inequality levels - or
simply entrenching existing wealth gaps. The last time the US Congress launched
a significant inquiry into tax provisions and regulatory requirements for large
foundations was the late 1960s. Many scholars, including Ray Madoff and Pablo
Eisenberg, suggest that we need new regulatory mechanisms to ensure that
charitable benefactions reach people in need. Proposals include mandating that
some members of the public have a voice on the boards of family foundations;
limiting the tax deduction; and capping the size of large foundations. Nothing
will change unless large media outlets such as the New York Times nuance the
fawning way they cover large foundations such as the Gates Foundation and start
asking tougher questions.

Foster Fries, a Wyoming investor once declared, "It's
that top 1 percent that probably contributes more to making the world a better
place than the 99 percent. I've never seen any poor people do what Bill Gates
has done." The bizarre statement implies that the 99 percent contribute
almost nothing to the billionaire class' wealth - a ridiculous notion because it
is the working class "ragged-trousered philanthropists" who are
actually the ones relinquishing their wealth each and every day.

Individual charity may well be a commendable impulse but the
idea that charity donors can "solve" the problems of poverty and
inequality is untenable. The amassment
of wealth doesn't naturally endow any individual with virtue nor do we owe
deference to individuals who part with their fortunes. Before philanthropy can
be properly understood, one must understand what capitalism is. First it is a
system based on capital. Capital is money (the value created by labor) that has
been commoditized. If you want to help the poor, eliminate the rich. The
wealthy think that money solves society’s social ills, but these are problems
all created by money in the first place.

The most recent US Census Bureau data showed that median
household income — what people in the exact middle of the American spectrum
earn — is $53,657. Americans in the highest 5 percent of the income
distribution makes $206,568 or more. More than one-fifth of households earn
less than the poverty rate for a family of four: $23,850.

Americans are not legally guaranteed any pay when they take
time away from work for the arrival of a new baby or to care for a sick family
member. According to a 2012 survey, about a third of people who get no or
partial pay when they take time off for a new child end up doing things like
borrowing money, dipping into savings or putting off paying bills. Fifteen
percent enroll in public benefits.

Over the last decade and a half, fewer and fewer
Americans are identifying as middle class, and a growing share says it is
working or

Almost 2 million more children than there are at the moment
will be in poverty at Christmas in 15 years’ time, according to projections by
the Fabian Society and Landman Economics. It suggested a family 10% off the
bottom of the income distribution would expect to earn only another £90 a year
– a rise of 1% – while those the same distance from the top would be 25% better
off with an extra £1,600. Cuts falling disproportionately on single parents
meant the number of children living in poverty would rise from 2.5 million
(19%) to 4.4 million (28%), it said – far higher than was anticipated under the
previous coalition government. That would include another 800,000 in “absolute”
poverty: below a set benchmark representing the necessary income to afford the
basics of life.

Andrew Harrop, the Fabian Society general secretary, said:
“If decisions made this year go unchanged, more British children will be hungry
at Christmas 2030 than today. We will live in a country where food banks are an
entrenched part of everyday life, not a response to short-term crisis. Is that
the gift we want to leave the next generation?”

Monday, December 28, 2015

The average family income in the United States overall rose
4 percent from 2010 to 2013 after falling 7 percent during the recession.

When adjusted for inflation, the average real income for the
top 20 percent of Americans rose 10 percent from 2010 to 2013. Real income for
the 40 percent below that, the ‘middle class’ and ‘upper middle class’, barely
budged, meaning they didn’t recover the losses they’d experienced during the
recession. The poorest people, the bottom 20 percent, not only didn’t make up
their losses from the recession, they continued to lose ground.

The Pew Research Center issued a report titled “The American
Middle Class is Losing Ground: No Longer the Majority and Falling Behind
Financially.” It found that 49 percent of total income in the U.S. in 2014 went
to households in the upper-income tier, up significantly from 29 percent in
1970. Forty-three percent of income in the U.S. went to middle-income
households, down significantly from 62 percent in 1970.

One significant factor underlying the widening gap between
the rich and others is a simple economic fact: The more resources you have, the
more wealth you’re able to generate for yourself. In common parliance, money
makes money and the rich get richer.

Income may have taken a dip during hard economic times, as
it did for even wealthy Americans during the Great Recession, but when things
start to improve, companies begin to gear up again, stocks and other
investments start to rise, and real estate prices recover. The Americans who
own such assets benefit from this, recovering faster than those who don’t. People
in the lowest income levels who are living paycheck to paycheck — if they have
a full-time job — find it difficult to save, let alone invest. For the ‘middle
class’, a home has often been their biggest asset, which is why the middle
class was hit particularly hard by the housing crash.

The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom
50 percent of Americans, and the wealthiest 1 percent own 42 percent of private
assets. Since 2000, the median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary
earners dropped until they are lower than they were 40 years ago. The ranks of
the working poor have exploded. Ninety percent of all Americans are getting
poorer day by day, while rich families are becoming an in-grained aristocracy.

The American Dream was an opiate to soothe the masses while the
rich rigged the system. In the case of the United States, Canada, France, and
Germany, for example, much of the recent growth in personal wealth (more than
20%) is attributable to capital equity growth alone. There was no real value
created here, just paper money for the most part. But paper money is power all
the same.

A century ago, at the time of the First World War, the
richest 20% of the world’s population earned eleven times more than the poorest
20%. By the end of the twentieth century they earned seventy-four times as
much. When it comes to wealth, rather than income, the picture is more extreme.
Globally, the richest 1% now own nearly half of all the world’s wealth. The
poorest 50% of the world, by contrast—fully 3 billion people—own less than 1%
of its wealth.

Total global wealth was estimated at $263 trillion in
mid-2014, up from $117 trillion in 2000. That was the same year that the world
agreed to bind itself to achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015
(with the headline ambition of halving the proportion of people living on less
than $1.25 a day). Those goals end this year, in 2015, in many cases not having
been met. Meanwhile, global wealth keeps on growing: by 8.3% from mid-2013 to
mid-2014 alone.

India's “middle class” lives barely above poverty line and
below international poverty standards, a recent report by Research Unit forPolitical Economy, indicates. A large number of people who are considered as
non-poor, are people living just above the poverty line. To put it simply, the
report underlines that while there is no clear definition of middle class in
relative terms, even by income, India's middle class continues to remain poor.

R Srinivasan, Associate Professor, Department of
Econometrics, Madras University, opined that comparing India's middle-class
with that in western countries was meaningless as India didn't have an income
distribution data. “Only three per cent
of India's population (around 24 million) are Income Tax Assessees. That means
that a whopping 97 per cent of population will have annual income less than two
lakh rupees. Even if you consider the lowest pay of a government servant, which
is around Rs 20,000, you would realise that they fall under the 3 per cent of
the population who are liable to pay income tax,” he explained, indicating that
the income of only the ones who pay taxes is available for perusal by
government organisations to undertake comparisons. “National Sample Survey (in
2004-05) suggested that in one in four people in India are below poverty line.
This means that roughly 25 per cent of India's working populace earns less that
Rs 12,000,” he said, adding that 72 per cent of working Indians were in the
'middle income' group, and no data regarding their actual income was available
with the government.

A global wealth report by Credit Suisse in October this
year, indicated that there were 24 million middle-class adults living in India.

Sunday, December 27, 2015

“Capitalism needs the criminal syndicates and criminal
markets… This is the most difficult thing to communicate. People – even people
observing organised crime – tend to overlook this, insisting upon a separation
between the black market and the legal market. It’s the mentality that leads
people in Europe and the USA to think of a mafioso who goes to jail as a
mobster, a gangster. But he’s not, he’s a businessman, and his business, the
black market, has become the biggest market in the world,” explains Roberto
Saviano, a writer specializing in organized crime. “No business in the world is
so dynamic, so restlessly innovative, so loyal to the pure free-market spirit
as the global cocaine business.”

The drug cartels are not adversaries of global capitalism,
nor even pastiches of it; they are integral to – and pioneers of – the free
market. They are its role model. “Cocaine,” Saviano concludes, applying the
logic of business school, “is a safe asset. Cocaine is an anti-cyclical asset.
Cocaine is the asset that fears neither resource shortages nor market
inflation.” Of course, cocaine capitalism – as brazenly as any other commodity,
possibly more so – has “both feet firmly planted in poverty… and unskilled
labour, a sea of interchangeable subjects, that perpetuates a system of
exploitation of the many and enrichment of the few”. He continues, “Cocaine becomes
a product like gold or oil but more economically potent than gold or oil. With
these other commodities, if you don’t have access to mines or wells, it’s hard
to break into the market. With cocaine, no. The territory is farmed by
desperate peasants, from whose product you can accumulate huge quantities of
capital and cash in very little time.” He adds, “If you’re selling diamonds,
you have to get them authenticated, licensed – cocaine, no. Whatever you have,
whatever the quality, you can sell it immediately. You are in perfect synthesis
with the everyday life and ethos of the global markets”

“You can’t understand how the global economy functions if
you don’t understand narco-traffic”, he says. A passage in ‘Zero Zero Zero’
Saviano’s latest book explains why: a
transcription of an FBI tape recording of a seasoned Italian mafioso in New
York schooling young Mexican footsoldiers in the difference between law and
“the rules”. Laws are there to be broken, he urges, but the rules of the
organisation are sacrosanct, on pain of death. “The law is supposed to be for
everybody,” Saviano tells me, “but the rules are made by the so-called men of
honour. This is how narco-traffic explains the world, by embracing all the
contradictions of the world. To succeed in narco-traffic, you apply the rules
to break the law. And today, any big corporation can only succeed if it adopts
the same principle – if its rules demand that it break the law.”

In 2015, much focus has been on Europe's migration
crisis. But people are being displaced in many other corners of the world away
from the media's glare. We are currently witnessing the largest and most rapid
escalation ever in the number of people being forced from their homes. Millions
of people are fleeing conflict. According to the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR,
this year is likely to see worldwide forced displacement exceeding 60 million
for the first time. Having realised that the existing framework for addressing
the record-breaking number of displaced people around the world is a disaster,
the rich are ready to try anything except letting them in, of course.

AFGHANISTAN

Apart from Syrians, Afghan nationals comprise the largest
body of refugees and migrants arriving in Europe. According to figures
published by the UN, this year saw almost 190,000 Afghans reach Greece en route
to other Western European countries. The significant deterioration in security
following the withdrawal of international troops, economic stagnation, and
extremely high youth unemployment are just some of the factors pushing Afghans
to leave their country.

However, the journey through Iran, Turkey, and onwards to
Europe is long and perilous, especially for the many Afghan children and
teenagers who travel alone. Many experience violence at the hands of people
smugglers or police, and risk drowning when attempting to cross the
Mediterranean. Those who do survive face an uncertain future as they experience
an increasingly unwelcomed reception in Europe.

CENTRAL AMERICA

Central Americans fleeing gang violence and extreme poverty
back home endure perilous journeys through Mexico to reach safety in the US.
Now they face additional hurdles as Mexican authorities implement a crackdown.

In the ‘Northern Triangle’ countries of Honduras, El
Salvador, and Guatemala, both internal migration and migration across borders
is taking place on a staggering scale. According to the Internal Displacement
Monitoring Centre, extreme gang violence – including rape, kidnapping, murder,
extortion, land expropriation, natural resource extraction, and the illegal
trade in narcotics – is resulting in mass deaths, casualties and forced
displacement comparable with conflicts elsewhere in the world. For example, in
2014 in El Salvador, some five percent of the entire population was displaced.

The threat of violence – combined with poverty and high
unemployment – has driven thousands of people to seek safety and security in
other Latin American countries as well as in the United States. Yet on their
journey to seek refuge, many people fall into the hands of human traffickers
and are exploited or even murdered. Unaccompanied children – of which there
were 66,000 in 2014 alone – are particularly vulnerable.

Both Mexico and the United States have increased security
along their shared border and increasing numbers of Central Americans are being
deported rather than being given the opportunity to apply for asylum.

MYANMAR

The Rohingya, a distinct Muslim ethnic minority group from
northern and western Myanmar, are often described as the world’s most
persecuted group. After years of persecution by successive governments,
large-scale attacks in 2012 resulted in hundreds of deaths and forced thousands
into displacement camps.

Since then, thousands of Rohingya have fled Myanmar by sea,
with many falling into the hands of human smuggling and trafficking rings. In
early 2015, jungle prisons and mass graves containing the bodies of victims of
traffickers were found, prompting Thai and Malaysian authorities to crack down
on the trade in people. In May, hoping to avoid arrest, smugglers abandoned
their boats, leaving at least 5,000 people adrift.

The Rohingya’s plight briefly caught the attention of the
international media when Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia refused to allow the
thousands of stranded refugees and migrants to land. Caving to international
pressure, Malaysia and Indonesia finally agreed to accept some of the refugees
for a limited time.

However, with continued anti-Muslim sentiment in Myanmar,
thousands of internally displaced people still living in dire conditions, and
reports of smuggling rings resuming their trade, the Rohingya are continuing to
take to the sea to flee poverty and persecution.

NIGERIA

Nigeria has suffered decades of instability, successive
military regimes and ethno-religious and regional tensions. But in recent
years, the northeast has been torn apart by the fight against militant Islamist
group Boko Haram. The conflict has displaced more than 2.5 million people in
the Lake Chad Basin region since May 2013. The vast majority, an estimated 90
percent, end up not in camps but hustling out an existence in urban centres
that are still in the conflict zone and were already very poor. Ongoing
violence and counterinsurgency operations have made it impossible to deliver
aid in many parts of the region. Hundreds of thousands of people remain without
sufficient food, safe water, or health and education facilities. The cities and
displacement camps to which villagers flee have themselves become Boko Haram
targets, as have the border areas of the neighbouring countries of Cameroon,
Chad and Niger. This is a vast and much neglected crisis.

SOUTH SUDAN

Gaining independence from Sudan in July 2011, South Sudan
descended into civil war in December 2013 amid a power struggle between
President Salva Kiir and his former deputy, Riek Machar. Fighting between
government troops and rebel groups escalated, reawakening ethnic tensions
between the Dinka people and the Nuer.

Brutal and ongoing violence against civilians has killed
thousands and caused widespread displacement. By the time an
internationally-mediated peace deal was signed in August this year, more than
2.2 million people had fled their homes, with 1.6 million displaced internally
and over 600,000 forced to seek refuge in neighbouring countries.

Food security has deteriorated at an alarming rate, with 3.9
million people now facing severe hunger. In October, three UN agencies warned
that 30,000 people in Unity State were on the brink of famine. Without access
to markets, jobs, basic services or social mechanisms, those displaced are
particularly vulnerable. Even for thousands sheltering inside UN camps, there
is little access to food, water and medical care and facilities are hugely
overcrowded.

YEMEN

The poorest country in the Middle East, Yemen has endured
years of instability and poor governance. After the 2011 revolution toppled
president Ali Abdullah Saleh after more than 30 years in power, new president
Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi was sworn in with international backing – but was never
able to fully establish authority. Yemen descended into civil war in September
2014 when the Houthis – supported by Saleh – seized power, prompting Saudi
Arabia to launch coalition airstrikes against the rebels in March this year.

The Saudi-led bombardments and fighting between competing
forces on the ground has resulted in massive injury, loss of life, and damage
to infrastructure, and has also triggered large-scale displacement. According
to the UN's emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, as of mid-December the conflict
had displaced 2.5 million people. Blockades at key ports earlier this year led
to major fuel and food shortages, while damage to infrastructure and ongoing
fighting continues to hamper delivery of aid, especially to the most vulnerable
displaced communities. By August, more than 100,000 arrivals from Yemen had
also been reported in countries in the Middle East, as well as in the east and
Horn of Africa.

UKRAINE

Almost a year-and-a-half of war, has displaced more than 1.4
million people and left hospitals in frontline areas short of essential
supplies, while the elderly and the sick struggle to get by as they can’t
access pensions or services provided by the Western-backed Ukrainian
government. Many have been relying on aid from the Russian side or from a
Ukrainian oligarch. UNICEF estimates that 1.3 million people’s access to water
is at risk and 200,000 children are more vulnerable to death or injury due to
restrictions on landmine education. Some 500,000 children up to 10 years of age
urgently need polio vaccination in rebel-held areas, and many of the 8,000
tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS patients will die unless medicine is provided, the UN
agency said.

Friday, December 25, 2015

The top-paid executives in Britain have salaries more than
180 times larger than average workers. At least 535 bosses are now paid at
least £1million per year, while Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of
advertising and PR group WPP, received £43 million.

Merry Xmas. In this season of good-will when people wronged
and abused by the world, make an attempt to be merry, and to offer a message
and a greeting of good cheer to their fellow men, our gift to the ruling class
is our hatred.

At this season of the year when the air fills with prayers,
songs and speeches about “Peace on Earth” and “Good-will to men,” it is fitting
to ask in all seriousness whether the system of capitalism, which dominates the
earth, can bring about that peace and good-will so ardently desired.

The charitably minded will attempt to lighten the woes of
the down-trodden with philanthropic gestures but it is not an indication of the
goodness of man, but it is an arraignment of the capitalist system by those of
us who recognize the indignity that a small minority has the wherewithal to be
charitable.

Christmas is jolly enough, a day that brings kindliness
enough, but you must be able to pay for it. While happiness cannot be bought on
the open market, there are many things which, unless they are bought, will
cause misery. The position of the working class, now more than ever before, is
one in which suffering must result. Gloss over the matter as the apologists
can, there still remains the fact that this charity is the outcome of a most
deplorable condition.

For many the usual Christmas festivity and pomp is somewhat stifled
because of the “spectre” of austerity. For a privileged few, a lavish abandon
to luxurious feasting, without limit or restraint; and for many more others,
the meagre essentials for keeping body and soul together. Capitalists have no
sympathy with the workers’ poverty and misery. Capitalism, in fact, requires
such deprivations, in order that the employing class may have their lavish
Christmas dinners.

Our position is clear. Down with capitalism and class
exploitation. Away with palliatives of any sort, and forward with the
revolution. Christmas is the symbol of new birth. Let it symbolise the birth of
the working-class consciousness. The yearning of the peoples of the world for
lasting peace on earth and good will among men can be fulfilled only through a
social system based on human needs. That is world socialism, the goal of
humanity. It is the only way to have peace and security. Socialism is everybody
sharing. A system based on human need, not human exploitation.

Christmas after Christmas goes by, and still the workers
forget to learn the lesson of standing by one another, and demanding with one
voice that the capitalist system should cease, and should be succeeded by a
system in which the wealth of the country should be made “commonwealth,” and
should be produced, distributed and managed for the common weal.

Thursday, December 24, 2015

As the news media reports the failing war in Afghanistan
where Taliban insurgents are prevailing and UK troops are again being sent into
combat Britain turning away majority of Afghan refugees.

While almost 90 per cent of Syrian asylum seekers and three
quarters of Eritreans have their applications granted, the figure for Afghans
stands at little over a third. Debora Singer, from UK charity Asylum Aid, said
there was a “culture of disbelief” at the Home Office that leaves vulnerable
refugees struggling to prove their right to protection. “That gap often
demonstrates the level of risk perceived by the Home Office."

“The UK grant rate (for applications) on average is 41 per
cent but the average for Afghans is much lower,” she told the Independent. Italy
grants 97 per cent of asylum applications from Afghan refugees. The average
across Europe is under 60 per cent.

Afghans, who make up 21 per cent of arrivals coming over the
Mediterranean and Aegean Sea according to United Nations (UN) statistics. More
than a third entering the EU are unaccompanied children and teenagers. Laura
Padoan, from the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), told the Independent that the
number of refugees from Afghanistan arriving on European shores had been rising
rapidly over recent months and appeared to be linked to the renewal of the
Taliban’s bloody insurgency.

The latest U.N. population report says 48 countries around
the world are expected to see their populations decline by 2050. It also
identifies 11 countries that, for reasons such as declining birth rates and
emigration, are expected to lose more than 15 percent of their population in
the coming decades. If trends continue, things could get even more dramatic.
According to the latest U.N. prediction, some countries are expected to lose
more than half of their population by 2100.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

As the jamboree of commercialism known as Christmas
approaches, we take the opportunity of expressing our attitude to it and
wishing you a tolerable and enlightening New Year.

Christmas developed from an ancient pagan festival: both the
date and superstitions like the mistletoe are of pre-Christian origin. It is
supposed to celebrate the birth of "Jesus Christ", a possibly
legendary figure claimed as the Messiah and as a demigod. He is the focal point
of one the most powerful and widespread, oppressive and stultifying religious
movements that have tortured humanity.

Religion cannot be reconciled with a rational view of the
universe and society. Inverting Genesis, we say "humans made God in their
own image". The rule of God in the universe reflects and serves to justify
rule by human masters in society. Why else is he called "King"?
Indeed. why else is he "he" rather than "she"? Like our
real rulers, he is portrayed as powerful yet merciful, presiding sadly over the
labyrinth of human misery. If God exists, he is our enemy.

Nowadays Christmas is primarily a secular festival. The
rat-race is suspended for a few days to give the morale of the wage and salary
slaves a midwinter boost. During the festivities, those that can afford it try
to enjoy themselves. The limited extent to which they succeed is evidenced by
their frantic efforts to drown out the consciousness of their alienation by
loud music, over-eating and—above all—getting pissed.And then back to the
grindstone.

Expensive and unwanted gifts are purchased and exchanged, to
the great profit of all the business interests involved. This custom is
scarcely a spontaneous expression of affection. On the whole it is more like a
ritual duty. A significant point is the way people are embarrassed to receive a
present and to have none to give in return. The exchange economy not only
fragments society into a myriad of isolated competitors; it also produces the
poisonous ethos of "you don't get or give something for nothing",
which penetrates personal life.

It is customary at Christmas to speak of Peace on Earth and
Good Will To All Men. But the tragedy of an outmoded and insane social
organisation continues as usual. Think of its delights. Poverty and destruction
in the midst of actual or potential plenty. Slums, famines, pollution,
commercial destruction of wildlife, waste, more waste, social divisions and
strife of all kinds. Built-in obsolescence, advertising, the domination of
money. Uniforms, tanks, bombs, prisons, muggings, alcoholism, prayers,
prostitution, national anthems, bigotry, fear, ignorance, loneliness, AIDS, Neil
Major and John Kinnock. Feeling better now?

Humanity has the means—technical, material,
organisational—to build a new world of freedom, harmony and enough for all. A
world in which the enormous potential of modern knowledge and technology,
released from the service of commerce and war, can be realised. A world in
which the human species owns its means of life in common, and controls them
democratically in the interests of all. A world in which the direct
satisfaction of human needs of all kinds had replaced profit and the
"national interest" as the moving force of social life. A world which
will know nothing of money or coercive government or national frontiers. A
world fit to live in.

We think humanity is fully capable of constructing such a
socialist society once it has the understanding necessary. We must establish
the new society soon of the species is to survive. Helping people grasp this is
the purpose of the Socialist Party. Don't just wish us luck if you sympathise
(we don't believe in luck, either). Contact us for more information; and you
might feel inclined to join and help us in the new year.

It is a curious anomaly that 16-year-olds cannot drink
alcohol, vote, or drive a car – but they can join the army.

Britain remains the only country in Europe to recruit
16-year-olds into its armed forces. This is despite recommendations from the
United Nations committee on the rights of the child and the parliamentary joint
committee that the minimum age for recruitment be raised to 18.

In 2007, the head of the army’s recruitment strategy,
Colonel David Allfrey, spoke about the “new model” in raising awareness. “It
starts with a seven-year-old boy seeing a parachutist at an air show and
thinking, ‘That looks great.’ From then the army is trying to build interest by
drip, drip, drip.”

There can be little doubt that the thousands of annual
visits to secondary schools and colleges made by the armed forces, together
with the estimated £26m that the MoD spends each year on combined cadet force
units, are designed to act as an enticement to a career in the services. As the
learning resource package, sent in 2014 to every school in the UK by the
Department for Education, noted, it is “always challenging and fun”.

The armed forces continue with their policy of targeting
their school visits disproportionately to schools in deprived areas and
children from low-income families, the Department of Education ignores the UN’s
recommendations that some form of peace education should be part of the
curriculum in UK state schools, and supports initiatives encouraging a military
ethos.

“Every child can benefit from the values of a military ethos,” said
Michael Gove, then education secretary, in 2012. The £45m spent on projects
from the cadet expansion programme to the Troops to Teachers scheme, together
with hopes for military sponsorship of academies and free schools, shows that
the department is prepared to put its money where its mouth is.